Stream: Valley Queen, ‘Chasing the Muse’
Kevin Bronson on
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Valley Queen have spent four years burnishing a sound that seems pulled from the history books — classic California folk-rock meets Southern rock. That, four decades after that music’s heyday, the L.A. quartet can transcend homage is testament to their talents, starting with Arkansas-bred singer Natalie Carol’s quavering, warbling croon.
The bulletin from the camp of Carol, bassist Neil Wogensen, guitarist Shawn Morones and drummer Gerry Doot is that Valley Queen will finally release a full-length this summer via Roll Call Records. A date has not yet been announced. It’s the follow-up to their “Destroyer” EP released in early 2017.
Along with that news comes a new single, “Chasing the Muse” — which the band jokes is “one of the most bummer songs from our upcoming album.” It’s a languorous jam whose guitar lines evoke Neil Young, and a song Carol says has its roots in a breakup that sent her in search of professional help. “[I] started seeing a therapist that was not very helpful — just continuously asking me ‘how does that make you feel’ and wanting to divide my life into parts of a Venn diagram on a dry erase board,” Carol explains. “She never really went deep enough with me for real radical change to happen, but that ‘parts’ exercise did conjure the beginning words to this song. I left that therapist soon after this song got written and sought healing elsewhere.”
Oh, and the guitar part Carol plays in the song was a gift from Mackenzie Howe of the Wild Reeds. Says Carol: “I love that she is weaved into this song through that line.”
||| Stream: “Chasing the Muse”
||| Previously: “In My Place” “My Man” “Ears Wide Open”
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